Tag: Liberty

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn.”

H. L. Mencken

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”

Gore Vidal

“If you try to confiscate my guns, I will feel compelled to give them to you, one bullet at a time.”

Michael Badnarik

“Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.”

John Adams

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.”

Friedrich Hayek

“Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.”

Ayn Rand

“Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.”

John V. Lindsay

Red Line

By Tim “xrugger” Stebbins for The Burning Platform

I have been thinking a great deal lately about red lines, those Rubicon’s of thought and action that, once crossed, present little or no opportunity of a peaceful return to the original status quo. There are lines crossed by tyrants, which finally trigger the violent response of a people too long oppressed. There are lines beyond which not one more compromise, law, or government threat will suffice to maintain a precarious peace. The riflemen at Lexington and Concord understood that kind of red line.

I got to thinking also of Colonel Travis’ apocryphal “line in the sand” at the Alamo. His red line was an invitation to sacrifice and martyrdom. The men who stepped over that line crossed in an instant from their present reality into the mists of myth and legend. Such is the power of a red line.

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The Surrender of Liberty in the Name of Security

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

Unfortunately, the trend first materializes when people need the government to protect them usually from an external force. The British used this tactic against both the French and the American colonists. That prompted Ben Franklin to comment on this trend.

After the 3rd Century Monetary Crisis bottomed in the Roman Empire in 268 AD, there was a surge to build a wall around Rome by Emperor Aurelian following the same pattern. Aurelian saw the corruption that led to the debasement of the currency because those minting the coins were robbing the treasury. Aurelian moved to DRAIN THE SWAMP in Rome.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Always stand on principle…. even if you stand alone.”

John Adams

“Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.”

Walter E. Williams

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you!”

Pericles

“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”

Benjamin Franklin

Liberty vs. Equality

Guest Post by Bob Livingstone via The Feral Irishman

Statist politicians — which means essentially all of them — believe or claim to believe they can legislate equality. As long as there have been governments, politicians have been dividing people into groups in order to pit them against each another as they squabble for government handouts, favors and special privileges all the while claiming they want equality.

Government panders to these groups, granting them a special status as minorities and providing them with extravagant subsidies. Minorities respond because they are conditioned to do so. Subsidies and racism and every form “otherism” are subtle forms of economic warfare between the middle class and minorities. All is a masquerade for the benefit of a wicked political system. This Machiavellian strategy divides the masses and provides cover for the government crime syndicate.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race.”

Thomas Sowell

“Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.”

H. L. Mencken

“It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.”

John C. Calhoun

“I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.”

Robert A. Heinlein

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion.”

Frank Zappa

“I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.”

Admiral Gene LaRocque

“Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

Friedrich Hayek

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.”

Gary Lloyd

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you!”

Pericles

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

Frederic Bastiat

“The best way to help the poor is to make them uncomfortable in their own poverty.”

Benjamin Franklin

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.”

Frank Zappa

“The true gentleman does not preach what he practices till he has practiced what he preaches.”

Confucius

“As government grows, liberty dies.”

Philipp Bagus

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

Benjamin Franklin

Liberty Gifts

Guest Post by John Stossel

Liberty Gifts

Struggling to find gifts to get for loved ones? How about a book?

I just made a video about some books that shaped my thinking.

First, Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” recounts how government trying to centrally plan an economy often leads to tyranny.

Government shouldn’t intervene, wrote Hayek, because a free market, like a school of fish or a flock of birds, creates a spontaneous order. No central planner will allocate resources as efficiently as individuals do themselves.

For arguing that, Hayek was ridiculed. But years later, even defenders of socialism conceded that he was right.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.”

Thomas Sowell

“Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else’s hair.”

Clint Eastwood

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised ‘for the good of its victims’ may be the most oppressive.”

C. S. Lewis

“Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant.”

James Madison

Americans are Stuck in Abusive Relationships with Power

Guest Post by Mike Krieger

And we recently discovered, if it was not known before, that no amount of power can withstand the hatred of the many.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Americans are brought up to believe all sorts of myths about the country we call home. We’re told our economy is a free market meritocracy governed by the rule of law. We’re told our civil liberties, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, are inviolable and protected by the most powerful military in the world. A fighting force entrusted with the admirable and monumental task of defending freedoms at home, and democracy and human rights abroad. We’re told we exist in a system of self-government, in which our votes matter and our voices heard. In practice, none of this is true.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Democracy virtually assures that only bad and dangerous men will ever rise to the top of government.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“Power tempts even the best of men to take liberties with the truth.”

Joseph Sobran

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”

Lysander Spooner

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson

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Get Up Off Your Knees

On your knees you may live to see another day, but you’ll never live to see better days.

Guest Post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Zoos are among the saddest places on earth: magnificent but confined creatures on display for gawking crowds, prevented from living out their biological destinies, fed their daily rations, and domesticated beyond where they could ever return to the wild. You have to feel pity and sorrow for these innocent prisoners; they’d flee in a heartbeat if they could.

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Gettysburg, Ghosts, Gifts and Gratitude

by Uncola for TheBurningPlatform.com

Earlier this week I posted a piece entitled “Thanks for Nothing, and Everything” which was generally political and fairly sardonic in nature.  Today, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I thought I would give thanks again, but this time distilled into a form more pure.  A Gettysburg Address of Gratitude, if you will:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Today, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the founders of the United States of America.  Thank you for mutually pledging to each other your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor.  Thank you for sacrificing all so I could take part in the fountainhead of blessings flowing centuries into your future; none of which I either earned or deserved.

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